December 21, 2012

Annual Report - V19.0

“One does not become
enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness
conscious.” -- Carl Jung

It’s been a warm, wet, and
gray winter so far in Boston. More times than not I’ve found myself standing at
the commuter rail station in Roslindale Village waiting for my morning train to
work searching for the sun over the spire of Sacred Heart church and I’ve seen
nothing but a diffuse lightening in a light gray sky. The best parts of the
winter – those cold bright invigorating days - have abandoned us so far it
seems. Things are dark here at the end of December, but I suppose that that is
appropriate since, after all, it is the Solstice – the nadir of the year.

And it’s been a tough year
in the Spriggs/Wallace household – big highs and big lows – the roller coaster
of life being a little more Six Flags than the usual Paragon Park this year.
Lots of passages - both good and bad.

Seniors

The biggest lows of the
year concerned the seniors in the family.

Lydia Touloumtzis, my
foster mother, passed early in the year after a slow debilitation brought on by
old age. Lydia was very much the independent person we loved all the way to end
– making decisions about what she was going to do as her body failed her and
finally refusing medical treatment when she determined that she had had enough.
She left as she had lived. I miss her independent spirit, the calls at odd
hours with equally odd questions, and her plain eccentric Yankeeness.

Another heart breaking
loss was the passing of Bill Wallace, Denise’s father. Bill had been battling
Parkinson’s disease for the past four years and I don’t use the word “battling”
advisedly here. Toward the end, Bill’s day pretty much consisted of doing
things that would allow him to function independently, whether that be sorting
pills or doing exercises.

One day in February,
brother-in-law Kevin came to check on Bill at his apartment and found him
incoherent on the floor. Kevin rushed him to the hospital where they eventually
diagnosed him as being dehydrated (from a misapplication of certain drugs he
was prescribed) and as they pumped water into him he started to come back until
he was okay.

But there were other
problems. In doing the workup to find out what was wrong with him when he was
admitted, the doctors found that he had an undiagnosed aortic aneurism – a very
large aneurism that was extremely life threatening. Being who he was, Bill
elected to go through some very risky surgery in order to repair it because,
even at 74 and with Parkinson’s he thought that he had some good years left and
he wanted to live them. Anyway, he went though an amazing seven-hour
“procedure” where they actually replaced his aorta, the main artery out of the
heart.

He was then in the
hospital for three weeks recovering and he finally made the transition to rehab
in a center on the South Shore, where he continued to do well. He was working
hard so that he could get home. As it turned out, he was working a little to
hard. Moving from the bed to the door of his room one afternoon he failed to
use his cane and he fell and hit his head. He hit his head so hard that he
suffered a massive and ultimately fatal cerebral hemorrhage. He didn’t die
immediately, but was kept alive by machines for a few days until the docs said
that it would be a miracle if he were to come back from the damage to his
brain. All that work only to end up on a ventilator.

Luckily, Bill was very
clear about what he wanted should anything like this happen, so this made the
family’s decision about shutting off the machines easier than it might have been.
But it was still a horrible experience and is not one that I’d like to
replicate.

One of my biggest regrets
is that I only got 4 years with him. I miss him a lot, but it seems that his
spirit has not left us. He seems to be hiding around different corners our both
D’s and my lives only to pop out and say something stupid and endearing just
like he always did.

The third person of elder
status who is struggling, but still with us, is my old Aikido sensei. He was
diagnosed with dementia and Alzheimer’s in the spring after a long period of
having memory lapses (and quite effectively covering them up). At this point, he’s
still with us, but slowly fading out. In a way, his case may be the saddest of them
all for me as it continues and continues. He knows who I am when I call, but I
don’t know how long this will go on.

Wedding

Somewhat of a counterbalance
to all this grief was the joy of D’s and my wedding in June. As my sister said
to me the night of the rehearsal, “I never thought that I would see this happen.”
To be honest, at the age of 62, I had my doubts as well.

At Bill’s funeral in April
many people came up to us and expressed their opinion that Bill would want us
to go through with it, despite the events of the winter and spring. It was a
hard decision, but we decided that this was right – Bill wouldn’t have wanted
us to postpone it for him – so we plunged ahead.

But the whole thing came
off just as we wanted (and how often does that happen?). The day was hot, but
the frozen margarita’s seemed to cool folks down and the focus was on the
communities that we both have been a part of over the years. And members of our
families (biological and functional) all came though like champs – helping with
everything from food to transportation logistics. Essentially, we outsourced
our wedding to our guests and, being who they are, they did a brilliant job.

From my admittedly skewed
perspective, it seemed like a great multi-hour piece of art and we are both
very appreciative to everyone who came and the vast number of people who helped
pull this off. And yes, pictures are still coming – I know that there is a
great demand for pictures of me in a Brooks Brother’s suit since sightings of
me in any suit are so rare.

Health

My health
is good enough that I can again pretend that I never had cancer. But then, I’ve
always been good at that. Denial of health problems is one of my main skills.

The PSA test
is good (1.1, down from 8.4 BS – before seeds), but we now enter a period of a
couple of years where the PSA numbers don’t mean much and we’re flying blind. I
may have a recurrence; I may not have a recurrence (there’s somewhere between a
15% and 30% chance of a recurrence happening). No matter what, I can’t worry
about it – anyway I don’t have that much more hair to lose so, for the time
being, I can probably go back to worrying about dying from a heart attack like
most 62 year old American males.

Denise
has come out of her surgery last year for cysts in good shape. So, both of us can, at least for the time
being, go on to focusing on the fact that we aren’t going to like all that
nagging health stuff that goes with getting old. You know, normal, cranky, old
people stuff.

The
Marshall Arts

Of
course, I couldn’t stay away from doing some sort of martial art now that the health
situation has leveled off. But my back still won’t deal with bouncing off the
Aikido mat, so I’ve started studying Iaido, a type of Japanese sword art.

I’ve
known for a long time that my friend Don Laliberty has been teaching Iaido, but
I needed some time to think about if I really wanted to do it. The art is
super-Japanese (every thing is done in a very particular, programmed, and
technical way that was thoroughly thought out by some Japanese guy in the 12th
century and then worked on by hundreds of swordsmen since then) and it’s not
something that you just jump into to see if you like it – mainly because its
going to take years before you become even competent in it, never mind good.
But I’m a sucker for these things that, as Paul Keelan says, have a beginning
but no end and I knew Don to be a very good teacher. So I’m back in the dojo on
Saturday mornings, this time wearing a funny skirt and trying, with a great
deal of difficulty, to get my sword back in the scabbard. It’s fun in a
masochistic sort of way.

The visual
arts took a backseat to the chaos of life this year with not much production of
bad art (which means virtual no production of good art). I took a technical
course in figure drawing this summer at the Academy of Realistic Art, and it really
was a “technical” course. I probably got something out of it, but not as much as
my instructor hoped. I’ll probably go back to some sort of looser art stuff
later in the winter and we’ll really see if I learned anything.

Skool

Since I
graduated with my “terminal” degree (at least for me) from Harvard a couple of
years ago, I have not been even slightly tempted to do anything formal in terms
of education. In fact, I haven’t thought of it at all. For Denise however, it’s
been another story.

D wants
to expand the amount that she’s teaching and, given the fact that we may not
live in Boston for the rest of our natural lives, a Master’s degree might be a
handy thing to have. So she’s now hip deep in a Theater Production Masters
program at BU. She likes it, but the amount of work, as with any graduate
program is a killer. I’m getting a little jealous of the jacket that she’s been
tailoring for months, since it seems to see her more than I do. But she just finished
that project and we may be able to re-establish connubial bliss yet again – at
least until the next course she takes.

Work

MIT is a
very odd place. It sits right in the crack between Big Business and Big Science,
and it seems to lean cyclically from one side to another over time. Since the
big financial panic of a couple of years ago, the balance has shifted over to
the people who tend to view the Institute as a place that produces “knowledge
products” (primarily scientific) as opposed to it being a school who’s purpose
is to educate scientists so that they can do research. Of course, I am, and
have always been since my days at UMass, very much in the later camp of this
dichotomy and this increasingly puts me into conflict with the ethos of the
environment in which I work.

Plus,
with the more corporate atmosphere we have the phenomenon of more people telling
me what to do. I don’t like this. I never did. And my personal tolerance isn’t
getting any better as I get older. Since I have managed to get this far doing
what I do, I expect that the higher ups should trust me to do my job, but
people want to “manage” me and have me document every little thing that I do
for the higher ups (since, I guess, they have no reason for existence without
going over “data” about my and my colleague’s activities). Not to put too fine
a point on it, but this sucks. The only question is if I will get so sick of
this over time if it doesn’t stop that I will have to find somewhere else to do
the act for a few years until I retire. At this point, I don’t know the answer
to this question.

Politics

Well, it
was nail biter up until the end in November, but, to paraphrase Winston
Churchill, “Americans will always do the right thing, right after they’ve tried
everything else.” Am I ecstatic that Barak Obama is again going to be President
of the US for four years? Given the record of the past four years, not so much.
But then there was the alternative.

It was
hard to gauge what sort of President Mitt Romney would have been since he
changed his position on everything every 5 minutes, but I have a feeling that I
wouldn’t have liked any of it. It was clear that he owed much too much to the
big corporations (who are people according to Mitt and probably should probably
have been able to vote), people like him who have very large checkbooks, and
the Delusional Right who still wants to drag us back to either the 1950’s or
the 1850’s depending who you talk to. Though I missed the 1850’s, I do remember
the 1950’s and they weren’t anywhere near as cool as these people seem to think
– especially if you were not white, middle class, or male.

Or maybe
Barak will wake up to how bad things really are (especially on the
environmental front) and we’ll actually take on some of these issues before the
whole country looks like the recently climate-changed Jersey shore. We’ll see
how bad things have to get before Barak wakes up and whether we have a chance
to pull out of the downward spiral before it becomes a crash becomes inevitable.
Stay tuned.

Extro

So, it’s
been a year of transitions – good and bad. It’s been a gray and hard time for
us this year, but not without it’s bright moments. Of course, the truly amazing
thing is that I’m still here and still, after 19 years, reporting that I’m
still here. I’ve got a new wife and in a few years, if I get there, I’ll be
retired and I’ll have a new life of some sort. I remain a grateful man. Thank
you to all who helped me get to this point.

Of
course, everyday is a new life and the Solstice reminds me of this. Things go
down, but they also come back up. The gray skies do clear and the light always
returns, as long as we take care of one another.